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I am pretty new to the game. As such, crafting is still a major hurdle. I am going to share what I've learned about it, but I won't go into alchemy here. Look up the alchemy crafting guide for that. If anything here is wrong, I'll edit this.
First, you will have to grind a lot to get your skills higher. Start early! Grinding is mindlessly harvesting ingredients like gems, state capsules, ore, wood, herbs, plants, runes, etc. Considering the max level to get the highest ingredients is around 400 or more for each skill, you will be grinding a lot. You can get items with modifications (or mods), but they generally won't go above 140 for each item. So unless you have 4 items with 100+ mods on them for gathering your ingredient, you'll need to grind. Anything you gather can be sold at most merchant stalls that have a coin icon, regardless of level. If the merchant level is way higher than you, click on the "View All" button in the lower left corner to bring up the merchants to trade with. A few merchants will only have quests available. You'll learn pretty quickly who can be traded with. Chatting to other players while grinding is a great way to meet other players and ask questions! I encourage everyone to chat it up. It makes the game more interesting, and you can probably make friends.
To craft anything, you will need blueprints for everything except cooking, as well as ingredients and property containers or charged state capsules for most. Ingredients are unique for each craft. Cooking requires meat or plants, herbs and cooking oil. Tailoring requires textiles. Leatherworking requires pelts. Blacksmithing requires ingots. Carpentry requires treated wood. The level of the blueprint determines what you will need to craft. General rule is ingredients and property containers must be the level of the blueprint or lower.
Conjuration is your best friend if you plan to craft any items like armor, shields, bows, wands, or jewelry. It is not required for cooking. Conjuration will get you state capsules, property containers and runes. If you pull up the world map, click on "Crafting Resources" at the bottom. You will see icons for Public Farm, Public Garden, Woodcutting Camp, Enchanting Circle, Mine Entrance and a few with weird names that all have the same icon (these are lakes where you can conjure). You can get runes at the Enchanted Circles, and state capsules and property containers at any of the lakes. Property containers are level specific to whatever you are crafting. State capsules are not! Once you are able to get the next higher level of state capsule, stock up on them and sell any lower level empty capsules. This will save you room in your backpack. Property containers should be whatever level range you are trying to craft, within the 5 level range (1-4, 5-9, 10-14, etc.). So if you are trying to craft a level 13 item, you will need a level 10 property container.
You are a failure! Yep, you will fail your first attempt at anything. This makes you learn the skill. From there on out, you are the captain of your destiny. You can level up pretty quickly if you have a lot of junk items to craft with. Sure, you will be crafting junk items, but the experience is the key. Plus, you can sell everything you craft. Some people want to learn every crafting skill. This sounds great in theory, but learning more than 2 or 3 will mean less experience per craft when you level up in the game. My recommendation is to spend 1 skill point per craft in the early levels, then don't bother as you will automatically gain levels in crafts and gathering every time your character levels up and at other points in the game. Base skill + skill points + mods = game level for a skill. If your base skill is 30, you spent 10 skill points on it and you have mods that boost the skill by 20 points, your game level for that skill is 30+10+20=60. You can always add skill points at any time when you level up, so save those for later unless you plan to only craft. Otherwise, you will need those skill points for armor, offense and defense. If you do plan to only craft, spend all your skill points on whatever crafting skills you want to perfect. A level 10 character can produce some pretty awesome items for any level character. You will only be able to do this effectively for cooking though, since you need blueprints for everything else. Blueprints can generally only be obtained by killing critters, unless you can buy them in the auction house or get them from other players. The blueprints available will be dependent on the level of the critter. Side note, tailoring will require you to have the salvage skill, which is only available if you have a land deed and a salvage station, or a lot of people are selling textiles in the auction house (very rare). I don't recommend this for anyone less than level 10. ONLY build a salvage station if you don't want the hassle of gathering resources and taking care of settlers for your land.
I'll stop here for now and add to it later.

Posting here, as instructed by Weyah.
I hired Morton the Chef within the last few levels to take a looksee. I really like him so far, but will his food ever have a stack limit of more than five? I can see this being a problem as I level up, and if I am going to level him up to match me I would like his food to be applicable towards big battles.